Wednesday, 28 May 2014

Taxi to Chitungwiza by 2014 Judge, Percy Zvomuya

Harare skyline

The life and fate of Chitungwiza, it seems, is to forever skulk in the
shadows cast by Harare’s miniature sky scrappers and lead-soaked fumes. Chitungwiza’s
small-time status is undisputed; in official and semi-official literature, it
is routinely referred to as Harare’s dormitory town, though it is populated by a million people. It is just 30km removed
from Harare, although it seems doubly-detached; the ever present air of
fatigue, inertia and desertion that now hangs over Harare is thicker and more
toxic in Chitungwiza.

Percy Zvomuya

It was while on the way
to Chitungwiza that I experienced one of the most literature affirming moments
I’ve had in a long time.

It was
literature’s eureka moment, if you will, the football equivalent of which is hugging a
stranger when your team eventually scores the winning goal in the last minute
of extra time.

I had boarded a commuter minibus taxi and sat in the third or fourth row, two people to my left and someone else on my right. About the people on my left I don’t recall a thing; about the person on my right, I remember almost everything: sex, height, and the conversation we had.

I had hauled out
of my satchel sheets of paper on which was printed “The World’s Longest-Held Prisoner,” a short story by Libyan writer Omar El-Keddi; the story is one of 140 short pieces of fiction submitted to the 2014 Caine Prize for African
Writing. Almost instantly I had become
aware that I had company. The man to my right was staring intently at the
sheets of paper in my hands. He meant it to be unobtrusive but his interest in
the papers in my hands was obvious.

Nelson Mandela

It could have been
the startling title which caught his attention. Southern Africa has its fair
share of famous political prisoners; there is Robert Mugabe; late nationalist Maurice
Nyagumbo; and, most celebrated of them all, is, of course, St Nelson Mandela. (With
the World Cup a few weeks away, the saint is now in heaven where he is probably
pondering football tactics with St Luke. It goes without saying that he is putting
on an Argentina shirt since his own team Bafana, perennial underachievers,
didn’t make it to Brazil, but that’s a story for another day).

Or maybe it was
the easy, unheralded way the story begins: “After failing his middle class
exams, Saleh al-Shaybi decided to join the army. He saw his fellow villagers
and men from the neighbouring villages return with new clothes, pockets filled
with cash, wrists weighed down by watches, smoking cigarettes from full packs
and lighting them with gold lighters. He decided to follow in their footsteps,
and wrote down ‘please take me' on his application.”

Whenever I flipped
a page, leaving my neighbour behind, he would remonstrate. After twenty or so minutes,
in which I had turned a couple of papers, him always in tow, he took down the
details of the story. He would go on the
internet, he said, download it, and read it for his own pleasure and at his own
pace…

Later, finding my
way through the inertia of Chitungwiza, I pondered the communion I had partaken
in with the stranger. Even though reading is a profoundly solitary exercise,
this was the closest that we had come to exploding that piece of wisdom.